Curses, Foiled Again

I was sitting in Waterloo, Indiana, next to the Chicago Line of Norfolk Southern when I heard talk on the radio about a train 880.

The 880 is a loaded Powder River coal train handed over to NS in Chicago by BNSF at Cicero Yard and it usually has BNSF motive power.

It is destined for a Detroit Edison power plant in the Monroe/Trenton, Michigan, area.

Although it was late morning, the lighting remained favorable for an eastbound. I planned to get the lead unit of the 880 passing a former freight station.

As soon as I heard the defect detector go off near milepost 370 I started getting into position because the train was less than three miles away.

I was standing in a city parking lot next to the former New York Central passenger station, which also serves as an Amtrak waiting room although the boarding platform is a block west.

The tracks here are slightly elevated from the level of the parking lot.

I heard a locomotive horn and figured that to be the 880 blowing for a crossing on the west side of town.

Just as the orange nose of the lead BNSF unit came into sight on Track 2, out of nowhere came a westbound manifest freight on Track 1, which blocked the shot I planned to get of the 880. I was able to get a glimpse of the 800 but that was it.

To be honest, what I said was stronger than the favorite saying of cartoon character Oil Can Harry of Mighty Mouse fame whenever something didn’t go his way.

It turned out the horn I heard was that of the westbound for a crossing about a block to the east. I had heard another train making scratchy calls on the radio, but it didn’t seem that close. Alas, it was closer than I thought.

What else can I say? Things like this happen when you’re trackside.

To Marion and Points In Between

Reflection shot at Crestline.

Parked CSX grain train in Crestline.

Restored N&W caboose in Bucyrus. Behind it is the monster NS coal train.

We got a second shot of the monster coal train in Marion.

First of two parts

For the 4th of July our plan was to head toward Marion but also play things by ear. It turned out to be a very productive day.

Our first stop was in Crestline where we caught a westbound CSX train. There were some large puddles so I took a reflection shot which turned out pretty well. There was also a parked grain train on the old Pennsy main in the yard.

Next stop was Bucyrus where the local society has restored a Norfolk & Westerm caboose. NS train 21N surprised us with the Nickel Plate Road heritage unit trailing.

A northbound followed and then a southbound – east by timetable but not by compass direction – combined loaded and empty coal train. 

NS has been combining trains recently to save crews although I have never seen two separate empty and loaded trains combined before.

The first part was a train 740 for a power plant in North Carolina; the second was empties for the coalfields.

This also turned out to be the largest train I have ever seen at 208 cars in length.

We then went to Marion where CSX 216 was switching the yard and had the entire town tied up for over an hour.

When he finally finished the floodgates opened with waiting trains in all directions. The monster train 740 also came through and we got it a second time.

While waiting we got word that the CSX 3194, the Honoring Law Enforcement engine, was leading a Q016 from Chicago. 

As this was the same situation and train that eluded Marty Surdyk in Fostoria last week during the Akron Railroad Club’s longest day outing we didn’t  want that to  happen to us. 

So we decided to drive to Deshler and, hopefully, catch it in daylight. You can read about that chase tomorrow in Part 2.

Article and Photographs by Todd Dillon

Nice Way to Start the Day

We had driven up Interstate 69 to Waterloo, Indiana, which would be our first stop during a day-long railfan outing.

Scarcely had we arrived when the detector west of town on the Chicago Line of Norfolk Southern went off on Track 2, likely indicating an eastbound was coming.

Through my telephoto lens I could tell the lead unit was not NS black and for a moment I thought that, maybe, it was a heritage unit.

It tuned out to be a BNSF pumpkin with a Southern Belle of Kansas City Southern trailing. That’s not a bad catch although I wished the order of the units had been reversed.

It was train 880, which had come into Chicago from the Power River Basin of Wyoming and been turned over to an NS crew at Cicero, Illinois. The train was bound for Trenton, Michigan.

In the view above, it is splitting the westbound home signals of CP 367 and passing the former New York Central passenger station, which is now owned by the city and contains a waiting room for Amtrak passengers.

Waiting for Air on the NS Chicago Line

Eastbound intermodal train 20E passes the Amtrak platform in Waterloo to get my day of photographing on the NS Chicago Line started right.

It had been a long time since I’d photographed operations of the Chicago Line of Norfolk Southern.

It had been so long that as I made my way to Waterloo, Indiana, last Sunday for my first railfan outing since early March it felt as though I’d been in another state or even another country for a few years and was returning home.

The Chicago Line has always had a mystique about it because of its heavy and diverse traffic.

I wasn’t expecting to find last weekend that same level of traffic of earlier years.

It was a holiday weekend, rail freight volume has been down by double digit numbers in the past several weeks, and NS is running fewer trains generally as it implements its version of precision scheduled railroading.

Still, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

I spent six hours on the Chicago Line and saw nine trains. Just as significant was what I didn’t see during those six hours.

I didn’t see a single auto rack car, I didn’t see any foreign motive power and, most surprising, I didn’t see any distributed power units.

There were no Canadian Pacific overhead trains running during the time I was trackside and no tank car trains.

There also were some very long lulls between trains that started in late morning.

The day got off to a promising start. As I reached the Amtrak station the gates at the main crossing in town went down for a westbound stack train.

About 20 minutes later came eastbound 20E followed 15 minutes later by the 24M.

About a half hour later came a westbound manifest freight and five minutes after that came the 18M, an eastbound manifest.

It was looking like the Chicago Line of old. But after that flurry of activity rail traffic died for more than an hour and a half before the lull was broken by an eastbound coal train.

The next train, a westbound manifest, showed up an hour later. Then came another lull of nearly an hour before a westbound intermodal came along. That would be my last train of the day.

Had I arrived an hour earlier I could have caught a 40-minute late westbound Lake Shore Limited led by a Phase III heritage unit.

And speaking of heritage units, various online reports had the Interstate heritage unit leading stack train 21T.

A railfan I talked with briefly said it should arrive in a couple hours. I thought he meant in Waterloo.

I followed the progress of NS 8104 on a Facebook group devoted to the Chicago Line.

I heard a scratchy radio transmission about 11:15 a.m. and thought, “that must be the 21T.”

I got out and hung around the Amtrak platform. I waited and waited and waited. I periodically checked the Facebook page and HeritageUnits.com, but nothing new had been posted since MP 248.

The minutes ticked away and I kept thinking I should be seeing a headlight any minute.

Something must have happened. Maybe the train went into emergency, struck a car at a grade crossing, or who knows what.

It was boiling hot and I feared getting dehydrated. I didn’t dare dash back to my car to get my radio and/or some water for fear of missing the photograph.

On Labor Day weekend 2017 Marty Surdyk and his brother Robert had been in Indiana for a weekend outing and chased a Chicago, Fort Wayne & Eastern train on the Fort Wayne Line that didn’t exist where they thought it did.

They had, as Marty put it in a trip report, been chasing air for two hours and 40 miles.

I never left Waterloo, but it turned out I was waiting for air for more than an hour.

The 21T goes to Kansas City and not Chicago as I had thought. It had turned left at Butler, Indiana, and gotten on the former Wabash to head to Fort Wayne and points beyond.

There is in Indiana, it seems, a lot of air. On that same Labor Day outing Marty and Robert had “lost” into that same thin air an NS train they had been chasing.

So it meant that I have still not seen or photographed an NS heritage unit since last August when I caught the Illinois Terminal H unit in Marion.

That disappointment aside, it had still been an enjoyable day because I had seen and photographed something which is better than nothing.

With railroad traffic in contraction mode for the foreseeable future my expectations have adjusted accordingly. This is a year to take whatever you can and make the best of it.

The 18M was long but had no DPUs today.

The 24M may be an an afternoon train in Cleveland but it’s a morning train in Waterloo, Indiana.

An eastbound coal train broke a lull of more than an hour and a half.

Some reefer cars are mixed in with the last cut of box cars on this westbound.

My last sighting of the day was a westbound intermodal.

NS Westbound in Massillon

The Fort Wayne Line of Norfolk Southern isn’t all that busy west of Alliance. You can wait for hours and not see a train.

Such is life for the one-time mainline of the Pennsylvania Railroad between Chicago and Pittsburgh.

In the photograph above, NS 7559 leads a westbound coal train in Massillon on Feb. 3, 2010.

Photograph by Robert Farkas

Glint Time

Most of the glint photography I’ve done has been at sunset rather than sunrise.

But during a trip to the Chicago Line of Norfolk Southern in Waterloo, Indiana, I had ample opportunities to practice glint photography with the rising sun.

That was because in the hour or so after I arrived in Waterloo there were five trains in succession, all of them headed westbound out of the early morning sunlight.

In the top image, a coal train on Track 1 reflects the light as it nears the Amtrak station.

In the bottom image, a string of UPS trailers glimmer as they pass through the crossing of North Center Street.

Carrying the Coal In Conneaut

Norfolk Southern train symbol 888 crosses Conenaut Creek and the former Bessemer & Lake Erie tracks in Conneaut on an early fall day. The train has a full load of coal bound for a power plant somewhere out East.

Information I found on line indicated that the coal is mined in West Virginia and that symbol 888 originates at Portsmouth, Ohio.

Train 888 then ventures via Bellevue and Cleveland and sets off some of its loads in Conneaut to be interchanged to CSX for forwarding to Erie Coke in Erie, Pennsylvania.

The rest of the train goes to Buffalo, New York, and is handed off to the Buffalo & Pittsburgh. I’m not sure where the B&P takes the coal.

Quest for Keystone Fall Foliage: 3

NS westbound 19G approaches the east portal of the Gallitzen tunnels as fall color fills the hillsides of the east slope.

Last of Three Parts

My next destination was Cresson, where I didn’t plan to stay long, but NS had other ideas.

But first I had to find my way out of Lilly. I had no trouble getting onto Pennsylvania Route 53, but I missed a turn in downtown.

I swear there was no sign showing that you have to make a right turn at the intersection where Route 53 juts eastward.

I went straight and wound up on a dead-end street. I had to zig zag my way back.

I had brought maps of all the towns I planned to visit, but hadn’t studied the map of Lilly enough determine how to get out of Lilly other than to stay on Route 53.

There is a large parking lot next to the railfan viewing platform in Cresson. I parked and walked up onto the platform. There was just one other person there and he spotted me and came over.

He was from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and we had a nice conversation about railroad operations in Pennsylvania and the highways in the Keystone State.

He been headed toward State College on U.S. 322, but got into heavy traffic of football fans leaving town. Those would have been the fans who stayed overnight after the conclusion of the Saturday night game.

That traffic led him to go another direction on his motorcycle and he wound up in Cresson.

We had plenty of time to talk because NS decided to go on siesta again. My radio was silent for a long time until the 21M showed up around 2:30 p.m.

Across the tracks from the viewing platform were three R.J. Corman locomotives that weren’t going anywhere. At least I got to see some bright color on a locomotive.

Not long before the 21M showed up, the Pittsburgh East dispatcher called the signal gang foreman to report that he couldn’t get switch 11 to show as having been thrown.

There was a good reason for that. The crew that had been digging around that switch earlier in the day inadvertently had severed a cable. They found some spikes and spiked the switch into position.

Think someone on Monday morning was going to have to answer for that one?

After the 21M headed for points west, I bid farewell to the guy from Lancaster and headed for Gallitzin.

As had happened in Lilly, I made a wrong turn coming town and had to zig zag to where I was going. I knew I was going the wrong way when the street on which I was driving went beneath the NS tracks. Had I followed the proper route I would have remained north of the tracks at all times.

I parked at the railfan park at the west end of the tunnels, but my stay here was brief. Nothing was going on so I motored up the hill to an overlook just off Tunnelhill Street.

The overlook offers an expansive view to the east, although it is somewhat obscured by trees and other vegetation.

But it is open enough to get decent photograph of trains on the east side of the tunnels.

By now the temperatures had finally reached the 70s and I no longer needed to wear a jacket.

I looked up to see a jet high overhead. I had my longest telephoto lens on my camera and snapped a couple of image.

When I enlarged the image on the camera screen I could see that it appeared to be a Boeing 747. But I could not make out any airline markings.

The radio came to life with a detector going off to the east and a westbound 19G calling signals. It was what I wanted to hear.

I could make out the outline of a train through the trees and waited until the head end came into an open area.

As much as anything, it was this image that I had driven to Pennsylvania to get. I wanted a photograph of a train grinding along with the mountainsides in the background wearing their palette of autumn colors.

I got it even if the colors were more muted than I would have liked. But the image says autumn and the lighting was good.

Having gotten “the shot,” it was time to slowly begin making my way west toward home.

I spent some time at the park by the tunnels, getting the helpers on the 19G, a westbound helper set and an eastbound intermodal train.

There was one last spot I wanted to check out and it would turn out to be the one with the brightest color.

I had been told by a guy at Cassandra that the color by the Pennsylvania Route 53 bridge over the NS tracks between Cresson and Gallitzin was particularly good. It was.

Shortly after I arrived, an eastbound trash train came along. I photographed it from both sides of the Route 53 bridge.

I noticed that an abandoned bridge abutment would offer a better place to stand on the south side of the tracks.

I walked over there and caught an eastbound intermodal train. A couple of young railfans joined me and we talked some.

What I really wanted, though, was a westbound. The light favored westbounds and there was good color at the bend where the five-track mainline curves as it heads into Gallitzin.

I had planned to leave for home at 5 p.m. NS had about a half-hour to send me a westbound. But the railroad wasn’t cooperating.

As I walked to my car I heard a scratchy voice on the radio say something like “3 west.” Was it west of Cresson or somewhere east of Gallitzin?

I thought about going back, but the day was getting late and I had a long drive ahead of me.

As I got on U.S. 22 at Cresson, I saw another eastbound coal train passing below.

The skies began clouding up the further west I went. But shortly after cresting ridge of the Laurel Highlands in Jackson Township of Cambria County, I looked to my right at the open view of the valley below and saw the best autumn color I had seen all day.

I was going too fast to pull over, so I found a ramp to reverse direction. I then had to go up and over at an exit to head westbound again.

This time I was able to pull over, put on my flashers and get out for some photographs of color on the hillsides.

Dinner was at a burger and beer joint in Murraysville named Crave.

By the time I left it was nighttime. I had entered Pennsylvania in the dark and I would leave it the same way.

But at least I didn’t have to contend with any more “highway robbery” incidents at the state line.

One of Pennsylvania’s many quirks is that you pay through the nose to enter the state on the Pennsylvania Turnpike from Ohio, but they let you leave without paying a dime.

Come back soon Buckeye and don’t forget to bring $7 with you to get in.

A broader perspective of the east slope as the 19G makes its way uphill toward Gallitzin.

Westbound intermodal train 21M splits the old signals and the yet to be turned on new signals in Cresson.

The helpers on the rear of the 19G in Gallitzin.

A westbound helper set running light is about to emerge from Gallitzin Tunnel.

An eastbound stack train casts shadows in the late day light as it passes through Gallitzin Tunnel.

An eastbound empty trash train in the first of a seven-image sequence. The view is looking west off the Pennsylvania Route 53 bridge just outside of Cresson.

 

Last train of the day in a four-shot sequence. The view is near the Pennsylvania Route 53 bridge at Cresson .

An Unexpected and Pleasant Surprise

Railfans go to great lengths to determine when something special is coming down the tracks that they want to photograph.

They’ve set up Facebook pages, online chat lists, websites and texting networks.

Yet there will always be a place for dumb luck in getting something out of the ordinary.

Such was the case during a recent trip to Pittsburgh. We had set up at California Avenue to get Norfolk Southern train 21Q as it came across the OC bridge on the Mon Line.

Leading the 21Q was the Pennsylvania Railroad heritage unit, a fact we had learned about through the website HeritageUnits.com.

We had only been there a few minutes when a coal train came rumbling out onto the bridge.

The trailing unit of the coal train was DC to AC conversion No. 4004. There are thus far only a handful of these conversion locomotives in revenue service wearing one of the special liveries that NS designed for them.

No. 4004 features the a black nose, gray body and blue lighting accent stripes. Yes, it would have been nice it had been leading, but I was still quite pleased to get it as it was.

Article and Photographs by Craig Sanders

One Day at Rymers Road on the NS Chicago Line

An eastbound coal train approaches Rymers Road.

One in a periodic series of images that I made last summer

I had never heard of Rymers Road near Port Clinton, Ohio, until I found myself on it late on a July morning.

Peter Bowler and I were railfanning the Chicago Line of Norfolk Southern and it looked like it might offer some good views.

A talking defect detector is located just east of the crossing and traffic on the the road was moderate to light.

We would catch three trains here before moving on. Those included two eastbounds and a westbound. The latter was a manifest freight with Union Pacific motive power and probably came off the former Nickel Plate Road mainline in Cleveland.

It also had NS locomotive 8888. If that number sounds familiar it is because the May 2001 runaway train in Ohio that inspired the movie Unstoppable was led by CSX No. 8888, which earned it the nickname the crazy eights.

One of my prime objectives in photographing here was to convey a sense of being in the country. I do that a lot with my images because so many of them are made in rural areas.

But in this case I worked with the road and an adjacent cornfield.

We were able to get what we wanted in a half-hour time span. Then it was time to search for another rural location.

Article and Photographs by Craig Sanders